The gingerbread house-part 5

Continuing my series on Robert George & R. J. Snell, eds., Mind, Heart, and Soul: Intellectuals and the Path to Rome (2018).

(Adrian Vermeule) I was baptized and raised as an Episcopalian/Anglican; my first school was run by Anglican nuns and I later attended an historically Episcopalian boarding  school. I  fell away from the Episcopal Church in college, and when I returned in later life, it was a different place. There are many "small-O" orthodox Christians remaining within it, including dear friends, but they have lost control of the institution to heterodox forces (58-59).

(Oberg) Going to the Episcopal Church near Harvard pushed me over the edge. In Holland, I had a brilliant, passionate Anglican priest, who reminded me of C. S. Lewis. He was prolife, which upset many, and I suspected he had been exiled from a diocese in England because of this. With him as my shepherd, I felt no urgency to convert [to Catholicism]. That changed when I returned to America. People at the Episcopal Church I attended were very nice, but it became clear that it was not my spiritual home. There was dissonance between the Nicene Creed they recited and what was actually believed that I could not comprehend (117). 

(Fuller) …part of what led to [my conversion] was the belief that if you're strongly committed to ecumenical reunion, the greater desire for that reunion lay with the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholics. 

One of the things that did bother me was that the Episcopal Church became an advocate of things like abortion, having begun by merely tolerating it…While the drift of the Episcopal Church, and of the worldwide Anglican communion of which it is a part, continued apace... (162, 165).

i) The irony is that the Catholic church is following the same trajectory as the Episcopal church. While this has accelerated under Pope Francis, modernism has been infiltrating the Catholic church at the highest levels since Pope Pius XII. So these converts are abandoning one sinking ship to board another sinking ship.

ii) I'm not committed to ecumenical reunion. 

iii) To my knowledge, the Anglican communion in general is not adrift. The Anglican communion has three wings: progressive, evangelical, and Anglo-Catholic. There's a very sizable and vibrant evangelical wing of the Anglican communion–unlike the dying progressive wing. The Catholic church has no counterpart to the evangelical wing of the Anglican communion. Moreover, there's an ongoing realignment to exclude representatives of the progressive wing, like the ECUSA. So for all its faults, Anglicanism is far healthier than Roman Catholicism. 

The gingerbread house-part 4

Continuing my series on Robert George & R. J. Snell, eds., Mind, Heart, and Soul: Intellectuals and the Path to Rome (2018).

(Beaumont) what history reveals is that Protestantism simply did not exist for the first 1,400 years after Jesus started his Church. What follows is that Protestantism isn't the Church Jesus started (230). 

A variation on standard Catholic trope:

1. From a Protestant perspective, the Protestant faith is older than the Catholic faith. The Protestant faith existed in the 1C. It is represented by the Apostolic church. And Protestant theology existed in the Bible.  

2. Over time, the church of Rome increasingly deviated from NT Christianity. We might compare it to the director's cut. Oftentimes, the theatrical cut differs from the director's cut because studio execs pressure the director to make the film shorter. The only version of the film the general public or film critics are aware of is the theatrical cut. But sometimes the uncut reel is discovered and restored. 

Another example is The Diary of Anne Frank. Her father edited her diary for publication. When Anne Frank scholars got their hands on the original diary and made comparisons, they discovered the omissions. It was then republished unabridged. 

The fact that Roman Catholicism became the dominant theological paradigm in the West doesn't make it older or more authentic than the Protestant faith. 

3. What does Beaumont mean by not existing? Does he mean the complete package of Protestant doctrines didn't exist in the pre-Reformation church? If so, that either proves too much or too little inasmuch as the complete package of post-Vatican II theology didn't exist in the pre-Reformation church. So by his own yardstick, what follows is that Roman Catholicism isn't the Church Jesus started. 

The gingerbread house-part 3

Continuing my series on Robert George & R. J. Snell, eds., Mind, Heart, and Soul: Intellectuals and the Path to Rome (2018).

(Joshua Charles) There are, in the Scripture itself, always two voices of authority: the authority of the Scripture and a living authority, where in the guise of Moses, the Judges of Israel, the priests, the prophets, King David and Solomon, and then finally Jesus and the Apostles. These stood side by side–Scripture and Living Authority–throughout the Bible (99).

i) Here he jumbles together civil authorities and religious figures.

ii) The office of kingship didn't confers infallibility on OT kings. Some kings might be inspired, but not by virtue of their kingship. 

iii) The office of priesthood didn't confer infallibility on OT priests. Their job was to present offerings in the tabernacle and temple. 

iv) There wasn't a continuous series of prophets, year after year.

The doorway

I think one of the most enduring literary symbols is the doorway into another world. The doorway represents an exit from our world and an entrance into a better world.

Clement Of Rome Wasn't Roman Catholic

There was a good discussion of the doctrine of justification in First Cement on one of James White's recent webcasts. If you do a Ctrl F search for "Clement" in the thread here, including in the comments section, you'll find a lot of additional information on the subject, such as responses to some popular counterarguments. But James White made some good points that didn't come up in the thread linked above, so listen to his webcast as well. And here's a collection of links to other material on inconsistencies between First Clement and Roman Catholicism.

Jewish scholarship on the Resurrection

https://www.globaljournalct.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Global-Journal-16.1-Habermas-Revue-Article.pdf

The gingerbread house-part 2

Continuing my series on Robert George & R. J. Snell, eds., Mind, Heart, and Soul: Intellectuals and the Path to Rome (2018). Douglas Beaumont is a graduate of the late Norm Geisler's seminary. For several graduates, Geisler's Thomism was an expressway to Catholicism. 

[Beaumont] One weakness is that it is easy for Catholics to get so caught up in all the ritual that they slack off on fellowship and discipleship. Many Evangelicals are adult converts; they became Evangelical in a very personal, usually powerful way and they carry that with them into their faith life. This is why they go to church even though there is no "pain of sin" if they skip out. This means that the average Evangelical church is likely to have many more fervent believers (234). 

A significant source of the difficulty is that a given person can be legitimately categorized as a Catholic even if they are in complete disagreement with the Catholic Church. That is because one does not become Catholic simply by agreeing with Church dogma, but rather by baptism. Because baptism is indelible on the Catholic account, dissent does not change the person's identification as Catholic. However, membership in most non-Catholic Christian groups is almost solely predicated on one's agreement with a given set of doctrinal affirmations. Consequently disagreement with a group's doctrine automatically removes them from that group. So to call someone a Calvinist who denies the doctrine of total depravity and perseverance of the saints would simply make no sense. However, calling someone a Catholic who affirms abortion and denies Christ's resurrection does make sense, but in a different way. I think this paradigmatic difference gives the appearance of strength to claims that are true in a sense but really cannot do the work they are meant to do in an argument. (235-36). 

The gingerbread house-part 1

1. I'll be doing a series of posts commenting on Robert George & R. J. Snell, eds., Mind, Heart, and Soul: Intellectuals and the Path to Rome (2018). This is another book in the genre of conversion testimonies about men and women who swim the Tiber. The book's selling-point is that unlike so many books of the same genre, these are testimonies by "public intellectuals". That's supposed to make it more impressive than your average convert. 

And that, in turn, raises expectations. When "public intellectuals" convert to Catholicism, are the reasons they give an improvement over the usual reasons you encounter from converts who are not "public intellectuals"? Many of the stories have a personal interest appeal, but most contributors offer only the thinest arguments for Catholicism, and nothing original at that. 

2. The way the book is billed is somewhat deceptive because some of the contributors have fancy credentials while others are just filler to pad out the volume. The editors didn't have enough public intellectuals to compile a whole book, so some contributors are basically fluff. In some instances the editors needed a token woman to provide balance.  

The Identification of the Beast as the Roman 10th Legion and Titus: An Example of Context Replacement

https://theologicalsushi.blogspot.com/2019/09/the-identification-of-beast-as-roman.html

Islam Is Right about Women

Led by the nose

Robert P. George

There is a widely believed myth that young people, especially college students, are "natural rebels" and "non-conformists." Nothing--absolutely nothing--could be further from the truth. I have taught thousands upon thousands of college students in my thirty-four years as a professor. The vast majority (though, of course, there are exceptions) are the opposite of rebels and non-conformists. They believe what they think they are supposed to believe, and they do what they think they are supposed to do.

Genuine independence of mind is not unheard of among the young, but it is the exception rather than the rule. It can (and should!) be provoked, but it takes effort on the part of a teacher or other person to provoke it. Most kids more or less uncritically--indeed unthinkingly--go along with what they hear, or think they are hearing, from opinion-shaping elites (whether it concerns pronouns, climate change, Halloween costumes, or whatever). Their greatest fear is to be "out of step" with the latest thinking or fashionable attitudes and beliefs. They sometimes censor themselves for fear of accidentally committing thought or speech crimes.

The Woke, and especially those in the vanguard of Wokeness, understand this and take full advantage of it. Of course, they don't acknowledge it, for the simple reason that they massively benefit from it politically. It underwrites "cancel culture" which has become a powerful weapon in the arsenal of Wokeness. And it explains the whole campaign to discredit the concept of freedom of speech (as a "right-wing trope") and to establish a climate on campus and more broadly that discourages (to put it mildly) expressions of dissent from prevailing progressive dogmas. It also explains the indoctrination programs that have become part of Freshman (oops! "First-Year") Orientation at most colleges and universities and continue in various forms through a student's four years. Those in the Woke vanguard know these programs work. Many young people are easily indoctrinated--they think what they're told to think. So everything depends on *what* they are told to think and *who* tells them to think it.

If you suppose that young people are "rebels" and "non-conformists," please just pause for a second to consider the sense of embarrassment and even dread fear a typical teenager experiences when he realizes that the sneakers he's wearing are not the ones all his friends are wearing. Horrors!

The problem with so many of our young people today is not that they are rebellious; it's that they aren't--and lack the courage to be.

Fatalism, paganism, and predestination

Many people have an instinctive aversion to the idea of predestination. But one of the interesting things about predestination is the way it requires a Christian worldview to underwrite it. In paganism, predestination is impossible. There's no absolute Creator God. The gods are themselves the product of the ongoing world process. The gods are not omniscient. No one god controls everything. They have territorial jurisdictions. 

So it's not possible in paganism for the world to unfold according to a master plan. Many events happen for no reason. Sheer contingency plays a huge role in history. If you reset history at an earlier date, it will never repeat. 

Greek mythology has a murky doctrine of the Fates. They predetermine the human lifespan. 

Classical fatalism is different from predestination because the outcome is inevitable regardless of what else happens. There is no one chain of events leading to a particular outcome, but multiple paths all converge on the same outcome. Changing the initial conditions doesn't change the outcome. It's not clear that fatalism is even coherent in a pagan worldview, except in the deus ex machina sense.  

The Storm on the Sea of Galilee

On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, "Let us go across to the other side." And leaving the crowd, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. And other boats were with him. And a great windstorm arose, and the waves were breaking into the boat, so that the boat was already filling. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion. And they woke him and said to him, "Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?" And he awoke and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, "Peace! Be still!" And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm. He said to them, "Why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith?" And they were filled with great fear and said to one another, "Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?" (Mk 4:35-41)

Two views of suffering

Doug Groothuis: "Two Views of Suffering: Atheist Existentialism and Christianity".

By the way, Groothuis recently wrote "Loving God and Others in the Midst of Suffering", but it doesn't seem accessible to non-subscribers of the Christian Research Journal.

30 books everyone should read

A friend, Ken Samples (whose weblog and books I'd recommend), posted this on Facebook: "30 Books Everyone Should Read At Least Once In Their Lives".

For what it's worth, if anything, here are my comments:

I think I've read the majority of these, but I don't think they're all worth reading. For example, I admire Orwell, but I'd agree with C.S. Lewis' assessment of 1984 and Animal Farm: 1984 is much weaker than Animal Farm. Animal Farm is the far better book. Animal Farm says more with less. The exception is the "The Principles of Newspeak" appendix in 1984 which is, indeed, brilliant.

Another example is Fahrenheit 451. I think Fahrenheit 451 is one of Bradbury's weaker works, though I've read a lot of Bradbury and generally have enjoyed him for what he is. He writes beautifully. I think Bradbury's best works are his short stories, but for novels I'm somewhat surprised The Martian Chronicles didn't make the cut. Of course, The Martian Chronicles is essentially a collection of short stories.

Likewise, this may be considered sacrilege by some, but I wouldn't rank Tolkien's The Hobbit and LotR as highly as most Christians or people in general do. I think they're good stories, but not great stories that "everyone should read". I find Tolkien often laborious to read. He was a philologist by training. I'd say this is reflects both the strengths and weaknesses of The Hobbit and the LotR. I've also read The Silmarillion which I likewise enjoyed to a degree but wouldn't rate highly. Much of The Silmarillion is Tolkien's reworking of various mythologies (e.g. the fall of Gondolin paralleling the fall of Troy in Homer and Virgil). Not original fare, but it's interesting if you want to hear Tolkien's take on classic myths.

I appreciate Dickens, and I love his wordsmithery, but I think A Tale of Two Cities is like an inferior Victor Hugo. (And I don't even think that highly of Hugo. Among other issues, I think Hugo's Les Misérables is emotionally overwrought. I believe G.K. Chesterton once compared Hugo with Dickens; I'd agree with Chesterton's assessment of the two.) At the very least I think Dickens had far better novels that could have arguably made the list over Two Cities (e.g. Pickwick, Great Expectations, maybe David Copperfield).

Same with Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Sure, I enjoyed the tale of "star-crossed lovers" in "fair Verona", but Shakespeare had superior plays, whether tragedies (e.g. Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear) or comedies (e.g. A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, The Tempest). Or others (e.g. histories like Henry V).

Likewise the first Harry Potter book shouldn't have made the list, I don't think. I think the best is the third one, The Prisoner of Azkaban. The first two books are still very much light-hearted romps in my view, while the deeper thematic and tonal shift that Harry Potter is best known for are well-introduced in Azkaban. Rowling's later Harry Potter books suffer from bloat. But Rowling has an inventive ear for words. Not unlike Dickens before her.

These books are generally fiction, but there's some non-fiction as well. I think it'd be better to draw separate lists for fictional and non-fictional works. For instance, The Diary of Anne Frank is valuable and worth reading, but I'd say it should be compared alongside other firsthand accounts of the Holocaust rather than compared alongside the likes of Bradbury, Orwell, Dickens, and Shakespeare (e.g. Elie Wiesel's Night, Corrie ten Boom's The Hiding Place). Or at least compared alongside other works of suffering imprisonment and death in totalitarian regimes (e.g. Solzhenitsyn).

There are a few books I've never been interested in reading. Probably because I'm a guy rather than a girl. I'm referring to books like Little Women and Gone with the Wind. Maybe that's my loss.

Just to show I'm not so calloused, I do agree with a lot of the books on the list, viz. Huckleberry Finn, Of Mice and Men, Lord of the Flies, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Charlotte's Web, Frankenstein, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and maybe Alice in Wonderland.

I'd note Frankenstein and H2G2 are militantly atheist books. Frankenstein is subtitled The Modern Prometheus which the Romantics saw as a defiant figure against the gods. It was also written by a young Mary Shelley who ran in the same literary circles as her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron among other atheists du jour. Both her husband and Lord Byron lived somewhat ignominiously as rebels against authorities and had tragic ends to their short lives. H2G2 is a hilarious send-up of the absurdities of life from an atheistic perspective. I regard it as something of a modern Candide (Voltaire). Still I see value in reading these two atheistic works to see what the best atheist literature has to offer in terms of tragedy and comedy, respectively.

And I'd say books worth reading are worth re-reading. Not just once, but many times in one's life.

Anyway I've gone on for long enough. I'd better stop here.

Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners

I. I'm going to make a few observations about John Bunyan's Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. It reflects a classic contrast between Puritanism and Anglicanism. Both Puritanism and Anglicanism have virtues and vices. On the one hand, I think Bunyan's autobiography is somewhat overwrought. Moreover, he makes salvation seem like a trial by ordeal–where the goal is constantly threatened. That makes for gripping drama when he allegorized his autobiography (The Pilgrim's Progress), but it stands in tension with sola gratia. If salvation is truly by grace alone, then the outcome shouldn't be constantly in suspense, where you dare not relax. 

On the other hand, there's an urgency to his outlook that's unthinkable in Anglicanism. It's inconceivable that an Anglican could write The Pilgrim's Progress. That's because Anglicanism, with its pacific ritualism, is prone to index salvation to baptism, the eucharist, liturgical prayer, and public acts of worship. So long as you use the right mechanism, you're probably safe. Salvation by ritual.  

II. Critics sometimes note the contrast between Bunyan's trifling vices and his terrified guilt. It seems disproportionate. In the same vein, I'm reminded of Ruskin's statement (in Praeterita) that:

Though I felt myself somehow called to imitate Christian in the Pilgrim's Progress, I couldn't see that either Billiter Street and the Tower Wharf, where my father had his cellars, or the cherry-blossomed garden at Herne Hill [his boyhood home] where my mother potted her flowers, could be places I was bound to fly from as in the City of Destruction. Without much reasoning on the matter, I had virtually concluded from my general Bible reading that, never having meant or done any harm that I knew of, I could not be in danger of hell: while I saw also that even the crème de la crème of religious people seemed to be in no hurry to go to heaven. On the whole, it seemed to me, all that was required of me was to say my prayers, go to church, learn my lessons, obey my parents, and enjoy my dinner. 

That's an obstacle to evangelizing adults as well. While the sentiment is understandable and even acceptable in a child, what it fails to grasp or appreciate is that in Christian theology, we are born lost, absent divine intervention. It's not as if the default condition is that we're moving in a heavenward direction, and must commit some heinous sin to lose our way. Rather, we are lost at the outset, and must find our way out of the forest before we're overtaken by the snowy night. Bunyan was fundamentally right about that. 

Creation, evolution, and male nipples

I've discussed this before:

https://triablogue.blogspot.com/2015/10/why-do-men-have-nipples.html

but I'd like to make an additional observation. Take a comparison: camouflage in general is functional. It conceals prey from predators. Conversely, it conceals ambush predators or predatory stalkers from prey.

However, many animals don't simply have camouflage, but symmetrical camouflage. That, however, isn't functional. Indeed, it's somewhat counterproductive because it makes the animal easier to detect. The symmetry doesn't blend into the background. That's why military fatigues use disruptive coloration to break up the outlines of a soldier. 

A Darwinist may say camouflage mirrors bilateral symmetry. But while that may be true, it doesn't confer a survival advantage. It has no evolutionary utility. 

Moreover, many animals have disruptive coloration or countershading, so the evolutionary explanation isn't consistent. 

BTW, this is a problem with evolutionary explanations: if a feature is functional, the Darwinist says that's adaptive, but if the feature is useless or counterproductive, they say that because evolution is blind. So the theory is too flexible. Something and its contrary are both evidence for evolution! 

From a creationist standpoint, male nipples may have the same explanation as symmetrical camouflage: it's decorative. In creationism, not everything has to be functional. Some things may be aesthetic. 

Greco-patristic exegesis

I've discussed this before:

https://triablogue.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-greek-fathers.html

but I'd like to make some additional observations:

i) It's not like reading the Greek Fathers is a shortcut to NT exegesis. After all, you have to know Greek to read the Greek Fathers in the original no less than the NT. Indeed, some of the Greek Fathers write in more advanced Greek than the NT. 

ii) In addition, the NT contains a number of Greek words with Hebrew meanings. Greek words used as synonyms for OT theological jargon. In that situation, the words are Greek, but they have connotations that carry over from Hebrew usage. 

Not only is a native command of Greek not advantageous in that situation, but it's downright disadvantageous. It can blind church fathers to what the words mean because they're using the wrong conceptual and linguistic frame of reference. Using their knowledge of extrabiblical Greek. By contrast, even if Greek is a second language for a NT scholar, he may be more sensitive to the fact that the word is a translation of a technical term in the Hebrew OT, and retains the sense of the original Hebrew. 

Worthy is the Lamb

Gathering the children of Jerusalem

Mt 23:37 is one of the most popular Arminian prooftexts. I've discussed in in some detail a few years ago:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2014/07/o-jerusalem-jerusalem.html

i) But I'd like to revisit the issue. One complication is how to translate the passage. In order to render the statement in idiomatic English, translations obscure the fact that the same verb (thelo) is used both in reference to Jesus and Jerusalem:

Jerusalem, O Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those who are sent to you! How often have I wanted (ēthelēsa | ἠθέλησα) to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing! (ēthelēsate | ἠθελήσατε). 

It's difficult to capture the contrast in smooth English, using the same synonym. Thelo can mean to wish/will/want/intend/decide/desire, &c. So in that respect, the point of contrast lies between something Jesus wanted to happen and something Jerusalem didn't want to happen. For now I'll stick with the word "want," but revisit that (see below). 

ii) Apropos (i), Arminians typically ove look the fact that the passage has three subjects rather than two subjects. It doesn't say:

I wanted to gather Jerusalem but Jerusalem didn't want to be gathered

I wanted to gather the children of Jerusalem but they didn't want to be gathered

Rather, it says:

I wanted to gather the children of Jerusalem but Jerusalem didn't want me to gather her children. 

So in that respect the point of contrast doesn't lie between those Jesus wants to gather and their disinclination to be gathered, but between those Jesus wants to gather, and the disinclination of a third party (Jerusalem) to let Jesus gather the second party (the children of Jerusalem). The object of Christ's desire isn't Jerusalem but the children of Jerusalem. It doesn't say the object of his desire rebuffed his desire. It doesn't say he reached out to the children of Jerusalem but they spurned his overtures. 

iii) Another question is the nuance of the verb, and whether it has the same nuance in each occurrence. In English, "wish" has a weaker connotation than "will". If Jesus meant that it was his wish to gather the children of Jerusalem, but Jerusalem was resistant, that raises the question of whether he got his wish. 

If, however, it means he willed to gather the children of Jerusalem, but Jerusalem was unwilling, it's harder to see how he could fail to accomplish what he willed to accomplish. "Willing" something to be the case is stronger than merely wishing something to be the case. 

Likewise, if he "intended" (or "decided") to gather the children of Jerusalem, but he was thwarted, then that means Jesus was mistaken. Intention carries the expectation of success. You intend (or decide) to do something if you think it lies within your power to do it. If you don't think you have the ability to pull it off, then that's something you hope for, not something you're in a position to decide the outcome on. 

iv) It would be consistent with open theism for the Son of God to intend or decide something but belatedly discover that he didn't have the foresight or mojo to carry out his intentions. So this would make it a better prooftext for open theism than classical Arminianism. So if the verb has the stronger nuance, that's a problem for classical Arminianism. 

v) Returning to (ii), if Jesus wills to gather the children of Jerusalem, but the Jerusalem is unwilling, it doesn't mean his design was overruled unless gathering the children of Jerusalem somehow depends on the cooperation of Jerusalem. Remember, there are three subjects in play. Rather, Jesus and Jerusalem both have designs on the children of Jerusalem–contrary intentions. 

What if the thrust of the statement is just the antithesis of the Arminian interpretation. Jesus gathers her children despite the opposition of Jerusalem. His success does not depend on whether Jerusalem complies. After all, he's not even attempting to gather Jerusalem. Rather, the children of Jerusalem are distinct from Jerusalem.

vi) What does Jerusalem–in contrast to her children–represent? Presumably, the religious establishment. Most of the religious leaders were hostile to his ministry. But that doesn't mean they have the power to veto his outreach to the children of Jerusalem. He doesn't need their permission to gather Jews to himself. Indeed, throughout the Gospels, he draws followers despite the vehement opposition of the religious authorities. They can't compete. They are impotent to stop him. So what if the thrust of the statement is actually that Jesus will gather the children of Jerusalem in spite of everything the religious establishment does to obstruct his ministry? Throughout the Gospels, Jesus bypasses the religious authorities. They can't stand in his way. He doesn't require their consent to save Jews in their midst. He prevails while his adversaries will be left out in the cold.